The Press: Final Fling

Danton Walker, Broadway columnist for the New York Daily News, was neither the first nor the best example of that vaguely journalistic genus, the gossipmonger. In his 23 years of reporting flack-work, rumor, trivia and hearsay, his wit was generally perishable, his essays at political thinking were often bottom drawer (Cuban Dictator Fulgencio Batista was “the most dynamic and forceful personality I ever interviewed”), his prophecies of events were mercifully forgotten, his items were usually inconsequential, though short enough to be mildly habit forming, like peanuts. But he was less given than his predecessors to malice in print, and perhaps more than any of the other gossipists, Danton Walker lived his role.

A Boulevardier’s Eye. Born July 26, 1899 in Marietta, Ga., he came to have the look of midnight on Times Square: dapper, mustachioed, faintly weary, cheeks feverishly afire with fine wine. He had the Broadway boulevardier’s neon eye for his sort of news; sent in 1935 to the Metropolitan Opera to hear Lily Pons, he returned to praise not her larynx but her navel: “Who cares for a mat ter of pitch when one can gaze upon the loveliest tummy that ever graced the operatic stage?”

As a New York Times obituary writer noted stuffily last week, this review “seemingly convinced” his publisher that they had a real property on their hands. Launched as a columnist, Walker wrote with an obvious ban vivant zest that to Daily News readers made substance unnecessary. “I’ve been accused of being a gourmet,” Walker boasted. “Nuts, all I can say is that I have tried everything put before me and never suffered any violent ill effects.” A bachelor, he liked ballroom dancing and escaped the heavy bores on his rounds by fleeing to the dance floor. “When you’re a columnist,” he said in the epilogue to his 1955 autobiography, Danton’s Inferno, “you have to run just as fast as you can to stay where you are—and I do have that dancing date tomorrow night at El Morocco.”

“Too Much Cha-Cha-Cha.” Early this month, panting a little but seemingly insouciant as ever, Danton Walker dictated a column from his hospital bed in Hyannis, Mass. It was characteristically name-dropping even when the subject was himself. “Too much cha-cha-cha can be dangerous,” he wrote, “especially if you try it the Danton Walker way. It resulted in a mild coronary for me brought on by cha-cha-cha lessons which began in West Berlin, starting with a delightful Italian movie doll named Giorgia Moll, continued in Rio de Janeiro with Mrs. Juscelino Kubitschek, First Lady of Brazil, and ended on stage (with Katharine Huntington) in a wharf theater in Provincetown, Mass.”

It was his last column, his last fling around the floor. Last week, ten days after suffering the attack, Broadway Columnist Danton Walker died at 61.